The Ramada Limited was five minutes outside town near the highway entrance ramp. It was a three-story, mid-range motel between a Wendy’s and a Super 8 motor inn.
Kenzi was a few minutes early for her interview. She was accompanied by a girlfriend from Marshall, a fact that immediately disconcerted Mansfield and Lee. She explained to the agents, who had been waiting for her in the lobby, that it had been a long time since she had talked to authorities about the murder and she was worried about how it might affect her emotionally. I’m not sure what shape I’ll be in when I leave, and I might need her to drive me home, she told them.
Mansfield and Lee said they understood, but that they wanted to speak to her alone. That’s fine, she replied. The agents told her that they wanted to interview her in the motel’s conference room, but another group was already using it.
Is it okay if we just talk in Agent Lee’s room? they asked.
Of course, Kenzi replied. Her friend sat down in the lobby, and Kenzi and the agents headed for the elevator and Room 226.
DiVittis was waiting inside. He introduced himself as an FBI agent, but not a polygrapher. The room was large, about twice the size of a room in the Kum Sung, with a big window that looked out on a back parking lot and beyond that a wooded hillside.
It was already dark, and as the agents had discussed beforehand, there was not enough time to confront Kenzi with their suspicions. Instead they concentrated on establishing a relationship with her—what Mansfield termed “rapport-building.”
“My intent that night was just to get to know her a little bit, set her at ease as far as what was going on here,” he later testified.
Each of the agents took turns showing Kenzi their badges, and then Mansfield and Lee began chatting with her about the fallout of the case. Mansfield told her that Jamie’s murder was eating away at him. He was so intent on solving it that he was neglecting his own family, he said.
“He said he wanted to get this finished with so he could go back to his family and go back to his job and continue his life,” she remembered later.
Kenzi sat in a chair by the window, nodding in sympathy. He asked her how she had been sleeping.
“I said I hadn’t been sleeping very well. I mentioned that normally I used to dream regularly,” she later recalled. Since leaving Korea, she told them, “I’d only had about three dreams that I could remember.”
Mansfield asked about the dreams, and Kenzi described one in which she found herself in a large body of water.
“I was being attacked by a shark and a train at the same time from different sides,” she said.
DiVittis, who had been silent up to that point, spoke up.
“He mentioned that for a female dreaming about a train, it’s a sign of sexual conflict,” Kenzi recalled later.
They asked her if she ever thought about the killer and if she believed she had talked to the murderer. Yes, she said.
Who do you think it is? Mansfield asked.
Nick Baer, she replied.
We looked at him as a suspect, but…Mansfield shook his head.
He and Lee asked her what she thought was keeping the killer from admitting what he had done. Every day must be so horrible, keeping this terrible secret, they said. Why not just confess and get on with life? Kenzi nodded in agreement.
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t want to,” she said.
Lee said that the killer was probably a foreigner and that if the person had already left the country, it would be difficult if not impossible for the Koreans to extradite. And even if they somehow managed to, the person would be looking at a very short sentence. The system is different, and Americans get special treatment, he said.
He cited the case of an American soldier, Christopher McCarthy, who had strangled a prostitute in Itaewon in 2000 and received a sentence of just six years in prison.
At 8:30 P.M., Kenzi asked if she could go check on her friend in the lobby. They were supposed to have dinner later, she explained. When she returned, the agents told her they wanted to set up another time to talk.
What are you doing tomorrow? they asked.
She told them she had to work at the Barboursville School in the morning, but could come by at 3 the next afternoon.
Before she left, Mansfield gave her what he called a “homework assignment.” He asked her to write out one more account of the events leading to Jamie’s death. The agents were worried that Kenzi might have intuited their suspicion and decide not to return. They had no way to compel her. They were all outside their jurisdictions. The interview was voluntary. Because Kenzi had expressed a desire to help them, the homework was a way to ensure that she would come back.
During the three-hour interview, the issue of a lie detector test was not raised, and DiVittis never even brought his polygraph equipment to the room. The move was to become controversial. DiVittis would later say that the fact Kenzi brought a friend to the motel was proof that she did not trust them and would bolt at the mention of a polygraph.
Lee recalled it differently. He remembered that DiVittis made it clear he could either participate in confronting Kenzi or give a polygraph, but not both. “Once you accuse, you lose” is a maxim in the lie detecting community. An interrogator cannot call a suspect a liar and then administer a polygraph. The results will be worthless. Lee and Mansfield decided that given their limited experience, DiVittis was more valuable leading the interview than giving a polygraph. They had to keep Kenzi talking, and he was better prepared to do that.
As it turned out, the agents’ fears that Kenzi was on to them were totally unfounded. She never imagined she was a suspect.
“We were joking and laughing, and I started to trust them. They seemed like nice gentlemen,” she said.
Their questions about how she was dealing with Jamie’s murder especially touched her.
“It’s easy to trust someone if they sound concerned about you,” she said.
By the time she got back to her apartment from dinner, it was late. She knew she had to be up at 6 the next morning for work, but she wanted to finish the homework assignment. She sat down on her bed with a pen and a stack of looseleaf paper and began writing out yet another account of her trip to Seoul.
Sitting alone in a motel room at night with three male government agents would intimidate—or at the very least, make uncomfortable—most twenty-year-old American women. But Kenzi Snider had never been much like her peers in the United States.
Whenever her parents’ peripatetic life led back to the United States, people always commented on her uniqueness. She’s so mature, so articulate, so independent, so self-confident, they would tell her parents.
Heath and Roger Snider just shrugged. It was the norm for a TCK—a Third Culture Kid. The term, coined by an American academic raising her sons in India in the 1940s, refers to the children of diplomats, missionaries, military personnel, business executives and anyone else bringing up a family abroad. These youths hold a passport for their parents’ homeland and may even have been born there, but live in another country or in a series of other countries. Although they are familiar with their parents’ culture as well as the culture of the places they reside, they are said to exist in a third culture of diplomatic compounds and international schools.
Kenzi and her three older brothers, Jordan, Durham and Roman, never knew another life. Heath and Roger Snider moved abroad before they were even married and stayed, at first to accommodate Roger’s career in the air force, but later because they enjoyed living a different sort of life than their friends and family back in Minnesota.
The two had grown up next door to each other in Minneapolis and began dating in high school. In college, Roger enlisted in the air force and was stationed in England. Heath joined him, and they were married there. As a Morse code signal operator, Roger could work at any base, but he found international assignments more challenging than positions stateside. From England, the Sniders went to Japan, and by the time Kenzi was born in 1981, they were living in Brindisi, Italy.
Heath, a creative, energetic woman, thought life outside the States was less materialistic and more spontaneous. With a change of scenery, even the life of a housewife was exciting. There were always interesting people coming through the bases or the embassy, and navigating everyday life in a new place could be an adventure.
When Kenzi was a newborn, she fell out of her crib, fracturing her skull. It was scary, but Heath tried to make the best of it by concentrating on the differences between American and Italian hospitals. The food, the demeanors of the nurses, the doctors’ bedside manners—it was all fascinating to her.
The Sniders’ relatives did not always understand.
Heath’s mother, a dressmaker in Minnesota, once chided her about her grandchildren’s nomadic lives.
“You aren’t giving your children roots,” she said.
Heath shot back, “They have roots, they’re just in pots.”
Her father left the air force when Kenzi was a preschooler. Roger Snider says the decision was made in a fit of pique. He and his commanding officer disagreed about whether he should be sent back abroad as he wished or kept at home. When he came in a half pound overweight at his annual physical, his CO ordered him to lose the weight before his next assignment, he says. It was humiliating given his fifteen-year career, and he opted for a discharge instead, he says.
He eventually found a job that would allow the family to continue living abroad. He took a position in the State Department as a communications officer in overseas embassies. The family was sent to Belgium, and Kenzi enrolled in the local public kindergarten, where classes were conducted in French. She became bilingual in a matter of weeks.
Supporting six people on the salary of one civil servant was not always easy, but the Sniders, led by Heath’s unwavering enthusiasm, concentrated on what they had: one another and the experience of living abroad.
“Money was never a big issue with us. We used to make our own Christmas cards together, and we made our own gifts. We cooked together and did the yard together and laughed together and always ate dinner together,” Heath recalled.
As the seat of NATO, Brussels was filled with uniformed officials, and the Snider children grew comfortable with them. When the children wanted to visit their father, they clamored up to the uniformed marine at the embassy gate and asked to see “daddy.”
After two years in Belgium, Roger Snider was transferred to Zaire, the central African country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The family moved into a house on a hill outside Kinshasa.
The Snider children enrolled in the English-language international school. Her brothers were old hands at being the new kids, and Kenzi, then a second grader, learned from them and her Third Culture Kid classmates. TCKs had to make friends quickly. They had to walk into a classroom full of strangers in the morning with a big smile and a lot of confidence so that by lunchtime they would have someone to eat with, and by the end of the day, they’d have a group to walk home with them.
TCKs didn’t have time to sit back and let friends come to them. They didn’t have the luxury of waiting a semester before choosing a club or sports team. Classmates were coming and going every semester or even more frequently. If you waited a year to join Girl Scouts, your dad would probably be sent to some other country and you would end up in some other international school, and you’d be right back where you started.
Kenzi quickly mastered the art of making friends.
“We’d be somewhere a week and she’d have two best friends,” recalled Jordan, who is nine years older than Kenzi.
The international school was a rainbow of races and nationalities, the children of diplomats, engineers, business people, and the occasional wealthy native. What the Sniders and the other children shared was a blasé attitude toward change. Countries came and went, friends came and went, language fluency came and went. For a TCK, the only constant relationships were with one’s self and one’s immediate family. That made for children who were introspective and vastly more mature than their peers at home.
Those who have studied TCKs say that the defining part of these children’s Third Culture identity is a sense of always being an outsider. For some children, this means never feeling at home, but for many others, it means feeling at home in any situation. Kenzi seemed to fall into the latter category.
“She was usually the lead in the play and usually the math marathon winner, and she usually won the spelling bee. She could do a lot of things and she could do a lot of things well, and so when she went to see the principal, it was ‘you won an award’ or ‘congratulations,’” her mother recalled.
Heath encouraged her children to be self-sufficient. When they would come to her with a problem, she made them define the precise issue, and then they had to come up with three different solutions.
“Now you need to pick the best solution, and if that doesn’t work, you’ve still got two solutions to follow through,” she would tell them.
The day-to-day life in Zaire was much different than that in Europe or Japan. The nation was ruled by the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and expats tended to live insular lives in what Roger Snider remembers as “rose-colored glasses.”
“You might hear how bad Mobutu is to his people, but you don’t see it and there’s limited papers in English, and the local papers certainly don’t carry that type of news. You just stick to certain confines and don’t look at the other side,” he said.
It was in the close quarters of Zaire that Kenzi’s parents’ relationship began to shake.
“Africa put a lot of pressure on the marriage. We had one car and there wasn’t public transportation. We always had to be together,” Jordan said.
Kenzi’s father spent long hours setting up secure communication systems between the embassy and Washington, D.C. When he was home, he seemed perpetually in a bad mood. “He was moody, sullen, and didn’t do anything he didn’t want to,” Kenzi recalled.
Her mom began wondering if they should’ve ever left the air force. And she wished she had a career of her own. At embassy functions, the Sniders could put on a good show, but back in the house alone, they were miserable. He and the boys fought, but Kenzi said her father rarely spoke to her.
“He kinda ignored me a lot. We never had a close relationship. It was never like I was his princess or I was his only daughter. I was the fourth kid and that was it,” she said.
After school, she would play in the house until her father arrived home from work. The minute she heard the door, she slipped out the back and stayed away until the streetlights flickered on below in Kinshasa—her curfew to be in the house.
Her brothers stayed away as well.
“We had a tendency as dad started getting angrier and angrier to just try to get out of the way, to just put his energy into something else,” Durham said.
When Roger Snider was posted to Haiti, the family decided to split up. Heath took Durham, Roman, and Kenzi and went back to Minnesota. Roger took Jordan, the eldest, and flew to Port-au-Prince.
For Kenzi and her brothers, returning to America proved the most foreign experience yet. Her mother wanted to get a teaching degree and chose St. Cloud State. She bought a small house and enrolled the children in public school. The first day was a culture shock. Kids, even young ones, knew a lot about money and clothes and spending. They were less mature and thought nothing of speaking out of turn or otherwise disrupting class. Classes were less advanced than the Sniders were used to, and the students seemed wary of the new arrivals.
When the Snider kids talked about where they had come from or their adventures abroad, other kids accused them of lying or told them to stop bragging. After Kenzi’s brother Durham got into a fistfight with a kid who did not believe he was born in Japan, Heath went to the school and gave slideshow presentations to each child’s class about their lives before St. Cloud.
Kenzi, just a fourth grader, noticed subtle differences. “Abroad, if the door knob breaks in my hand, we would say, the door knob broke. In America, we say, Kenzi broke the door knob,” she remembered thinking.
Heath was a full-time student, and money was very short.
“I think of it as the poverty years. We were on food stamps, but I didn’t want the kids to know,” she remembered.
Friends from the Unitarian church invited them over for meals and gave them clothes. Kenzi, however, focused on school. Her teachers delighted in her enthusiasm. Her scrapbooks from those years are filled with awards and photos of school projects and Girl Scout outings.
After three years apart, her parents decided to try to make the marriage work one last time. The family joined Roger in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Kenzi loved being back in an international school. She quickly made friends and learned about her new home. For a few weeks, her parents seemed happy, but by the end of the school year, it was clear things were not improving. After a brief stint in Florida, the couple divorced, and Kenzi and her mother returned to St. Cloud. Kenzi spent tenth grade at the local high school.
“She was so much more mature than any of us,” Dan Roeder, a classmate, recalls. “At the time, I’d never even been outside of Minnesota, and she’d lived in all these interesting places.”
Kenzi again noticed a lot of the things she disliked about American schools. The bullies and disorder on the school bus bothered her enough that she took a city bus to school.
In class, she exuded a self-confidence that some students liked and others hated.
“She instantly became a best friend, or they really didn’t care if they ever saw her again,” Cassie Roeder, Dan’s wife and another classmate, remembered.
“I think it was because she didn’t conform. She was who she was and she didn’t try to impress you. It was take it or leave it, whereas a lot of people in high school were trying to be like everybody else,” she said.
By then, Kenzi had already decided that she wanted a career in education, maybe as a high school principal or counselor.
“She was so willing to share her dreams and goals. We thought of high school as this thing we were stuck in the middle of, but she could see it as her future. She was just ahead of us,” Dan Roeder recalled.
After a year in Minnesota, Kenzi’s mother was eager to get back to living abroad. She found a job teaching at a boys’ school in Kuwait. Durham and Roman were staying behind, and for the first time, it would be just her and Kenzi going abroad. As mother and only daughter, the two had always been close. The boys openly referred to Kenzi as “mom’s favorite.” Going to Kuwait increased their already strong bond. After decades as a housewife, Heath had survived her difficult divorce and was finally an independent person with a career. Kenzi was on the cusp of young womanhood and thrilled to return to a life abroad, where her peers would be smart, worldly and kind.
Kenzi enrolled in the American School of Kuwait and began adjusting to a country far different from any she had lived in before. In the Muslim kingdom, the government controlled every school, even the private ones. All textbooks and teaching materials were subject to its approval. Pages concerning the Holocaust were cut out of history books. Inflatable globes would be returned to teachers deflated because government censors cut Israel out of the map.
Kenzi and her mother arrived at a time of tension between Iraq and the United States over compliance with weapons inspectors. American troops were streaming into Kuwait, and there was concern Iraq might try to attack. In Kenzi’s school, there were drills for chemical weapon attacks. Children were given gas masks, and at the embassy, Americans were instructed that should there be an attack they would be whisked to the desert by army troops and then onto an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. military bases were the hubs of social life for Americans in Kuwait. The expats went there for exercise, meals out, shopping and church. Kenzi began attending an evangelical church on base, mostly to meet people, but she was inspired by what she heard, and in the spring of her senior year, she told the church leaders that she wanted to accept Jesus Christ and be born again. She must have been one of the few people ever to convert to Christianity in Kuwait. From her time on the base and at church, she knew the embassy officials and the army brass as pals more than as authority figures.
“When you are overseas, authority figures are the moms and dads of your friends. You see your authority figures at the club, you see authority figures at the commissary, you have them over to your house, you play with their children,” Heath remembered.
“There was no fear. There was just a sense of us being protected,” she said.
Despite the winds of war, high school life was fairly normal. In her junior and senior years, Kenzi hung out with friends at fast-food joints in Kuwait City. They talked about who liked whom and where to go to college. The country was officially dry, but some students hosted discreet drinking parties with alcohol made from secret home stills.
Kenzi’s school was filled with the children of sheiks, high-level diplomats and oil executives. She was one of the few poor kids.
“Our mothers sort of stood out because they were single and teachers,” said Erin Lambert, Kenzi’s best friend in Kuwait. Her mother also taught at the American School.
“We had less money. Our moms made our clothes and made their clothes. It wasn’t terrible or anything, but we were aware of it,” she added.
Kenzi dated a Canadian senior year, and they went together to the prom. Her mother made her a “Cinderella” dress with yards and yards of blue silk. The photos from that night show Kenzi smiling next to a tall young man in a tuxedo. Her strawberry blond hair is swept into a chignon, and a black velvet ribbon encircles her neck. Kenzi and her date are standing in a nondescript banquet hall, and nothing in the picture indicates it was taken in Kuwait. She looks like a typical American promgoer, happy and trying to look glamorous.
Looking at the photo, it is hard not to think of the prom in Derry. Jamie Penich decided to forgo that tradition for ten months of the sort of international life that Kenzi Snider thought of as everyday life.